Scarlet Lettering Collab with Carolyn Bouchard

After much reflection on the current state of womanly affairs, I decided to resurrect a very old project: a dimensional type take on an illuminated Scarlet Letter. After a couple of adjustments to my original sketch circa 2009, I contacted typographic embroiderer, Carolyn Bouchard, to gauge her interest. She gave me a crash course on embroidery, at which point I vectorized the first iteration, leaving room for her typographic sensibilities in the stem. We sent files back and forth digitally, Carolyn at one point determining a quote from Hawthorne’s puritanical classic was most fitting: “Do anything, save lie down and die.”

She hand stitched the seven inch “A” on an obliging black silk shirt and sent it back to me for styling and shooting. A beautiful reminder that women battle the labels associated with their gender and sexuality on a daily basis. We can challenge the narrative by combining forces for the collective and individual stories we carry, by “doing anything, save lying down and dying.”